Use pumped storage systems to store solar genetarted electricity.

now that is a realy off the wall idea…
i have a question for you dunk…how old are you?
csx engineer

You just don’t get it.

The purpose of pumped storage facilities is to maintain loading on other power plants. Unlike the relativel small prime movers used in surface transportation (cars, trains and ships), multimegawatt power plants cannot “follow the load”. They can increase or decrease their output by only a couple megawatts and hour. Consequently, they have to run at essentially the same full power output all the time. The excess generating capacity is used to fill up the pumped storage reservoir at night. During the day, when these multimegawatt plants’ output is insuffficient to provide all the power needs of the grid, the pumped storage water is allowed to flow back through the pumping turbines to provide the extra peaking power needed to meet the requirements of grid system.
To put it in railroad terms, suppose the diesels’ dynamic brakes charged up a large bank of batteries housed in a trailing slug instead of disapating the power as heat . That slug could then be used as an additional booster to maintain the train’s speed up the next grade without the expenditure of additional fuel. This is the principal of the hybrid drive that is increasingly being used in automobiles.
Solar cells shut down at night. Their power has to used immediately in order to make them economical. It does not pay to store their power, particularly since no conversion process (light to electricity, storage or electricity, regeneration of electricity, transmission of that power, is 100% efficient.

But that would mean that we would have clean power 24 hours a day. If we had signed the Kyoto Agreement we would be working on this right now.

Pump storage is an old idea whose time will only come when people are willing to have the tops of their mountains lopped off for kind of a giant toilet bowl that gets flushed every day. They tried to pu***his idea through on one of the most scenic portions of the Hudson River decades ago. It went nowhere.

Wayne

kevarc, I am a veteran of two such projects (Wallace Dam and Rocky Mountian) from my time with Georgia Power. The use of reverse pump technology has been around for a while. The use of them as has been spoken of earlier in this thread is to use electricity made at night to do the job. The main reason that the utilities do pump storage is to maintain their heat rates in their coal and nuclear units through the night. In the long run this is a great imporvement in costs of maintaining the generating grid. The longer those units remain consistant in temprature the better and less expensive they become to operate. Standard economics of the matter , the lower the cost, the greater the margin together with a stable rate per kilowatt the higher the profit to the stockholders, the greater the dependability to customers and users at a stable price.

piouslion - yep. Gotta keep the baseload unit running at as high utilization as possible. That is what they are designed for.

But that would mean that we would have clean power 24 hours a day. If we had signed the Kyoto Agreement we would be working on this right now.

First - you truely are an idiot…
Second - you think jobs are moving overseas now? Just imagine how fast the rest of our industry would move to where there will be no controls at ALL if Kyoto were adopted. Just don’t spout of what you read in the papers or on the net. Read the ***ed thing and just see how bad it really is.

Well… I believe that clean sources of engery will pay for themselves overtime.
They may be expensive now but who knows what the cost of Coal and Oil will be. Theee are many mounatain top sthat being blow off right now to extract coal. By using wind and solar which cost nothing in having to buy raw materials they can pay for themselves over 30 years. Coal mines could also be used as resurvoirs as recalmation.
Is it any wonder that the US has the second (Canada) in next to last of miles electrified of Railroads inthe world. Acring to my freinds at Collinwood they use 40,000,000 gallons of diesal a year between Albany and Cleveland

Rule # 1 in physics ; Conservaton of energy. If you extract or modify energy, there will be a systematic countering effect somewhere else. Wind turbines? Great idea until you consider what extracting kinetic energy from the atmosphere in large quantities will do. I think there are no simple answers to energy problems in a burgeoning world populaton that needs increasing amounts of energy to maintain our rates of replicating.

Interesting topic, although some seem to have short fuses.

Wind power huh? Where I am, these windfarms have just been approved to be built. These environmentalists have been begging the state to put them up. Well, the state approved them last week, and now they very same environmentalists who were begging for them are now saying that putting up windfarms will do more harm than good; to birds and bats. THERE IS NO PLEASING THOSE IDIOTS!!! And the EPA is agreeing with them. It’s like I have been saying, no matter what you tell the EPA, they will always side with the extremest environmental groups. Sad but true. And I agree with the fact that had we signed the kyoto agreement, we would be hurting horribly economically, jobs would be goin overseas like there was no tomorrow.

I agree there is no pleasing those idiots. And yet most all of them tree huggers live in wooden homes and drive petro-fuel burning cars. Those people are usualy the most clueless.

They were clueless back in the late 70’s also.

I was in college when the UMWA went out on strike. I was a member back then as that was where I worked in th summer and during holidays to pay for college. The nutters were going to have a rally in support of the striking miners. Another guy and I were having some liquid refreshments and after a few we decided since we were union folks we would go. We never laughed so hard. These folks did not have a clue. Jeez, they still had us mining with pick and shovel. When we told what is was really like in the mines they really didn’t want to believe us. They couldn’t understand that if we thought we needed a repirator, all we had to do was ask for one and they would give it to us. They also thought that we made 4 bucks/hour. When we told them, that as general inside laborers we were almost making 10/ hour they definately thought we were not being quite truthfull. Thankfully we had a union cards with us. We offered to go get a copy of the bargaining agreement to prove that we made what we did.

kevarc,
Could you tell me how the load is regulated at a baseload plant. I mean like when the load is less than the supply.

You shouldn’t load controlwith a baseload plant. Coal fired plants are a total pain to ramp up and down, nucs are a bit easier.

Coal fired plant you would reduce the coal sent to the firebox, or choke back the steam going to the turbine. With a nuc you would insert the control rods to limit the reaction.

But you really do not want to, baseload plants are the cheapest to operate, so you want to run them as much as possible. For our plant we run it as high as we can and use one of our gas fired boilers to load control, they are a lot easier to ramp up and down to follow the load. Gas turbines are the easiest to follow load with and with the newer ones, they have a great heat rates. Heat rate is the total amount of heat input into a steam generator, divided by the net output of the plant in terms of kilowatts. The lower the number the better the plant. You can take that number and reference that againt the price of the fuel. That will give you a better idea on what you want. The high NG prices lately have put a real hurt on those with NG fired turbines. High furl costs can negate the better heat rate. If we still had 2.50-3.00$/mmbtu gas, they are cost comparitive with other units.

Interesting. I figured there was some controll downstream from the actual generator for controll. So what happens if all of the sudden a large portion of your load drops out, like a blown transformer ( I realize this is probably not that common).

Well, remember New York? That is a drastic case but it does happen. But the load will flow and their are safegrauds that are built into the system and should be used, not bypassed. If we shed load all of a sudden, we just give free juice to the grid until we ramp the unit(s) down.

Nope it is all done at the plant - the plant people do not control this, most of the time, the control center for the company/control area/region are the ones that actually control the unit. For us, our control center is her in Lafayette, LA. The units we use for load control are either in Houma, Plaquemine, or Morgan City , LA. We generelly only have one running. Now if we need to ramp the unit up, the operator in the control center here in Lafayette send a signal to the unit to increase output. The operator at the plant does not do it, unless communication is lost between the control room computer and the unit controls.

Do some research on the causes of the last big northeast blackout. Should answer your question.

Your garden variety pole mounted transformer blowing is only a blip on the big scheme of things. Everybody arriving home from work and firing up the AC at about the same time is a bigger issue.

“Your garden variety pole mounted transformer blowing is only a blip on the big scheme of things. Everybody arriving home from work and firing up the AC at about the same time is a bigger issue.”

Not really. Now, if you cascade the tranformer failures AND have the entire town turn on their AC, then you may have a problem. A good system op knows the load characteristics and is able to ramp a unit up or down and stay with the load curve.

You can always tell if we get afternoon rain here in the summer. The load drops rather quickly, the ops need to be on their toes…